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Kingston HyperX Fury White 2 x 4GB PC3 15000 Review

Kingston HyperX Fury White 2 x 4GB PC3 15000 Testing:

Memory is often hard to separate from one kit to another in gaming, but when it comes to number crunching and computing, some memory provides an extra boost in comparison. To see just what kind of performance this kit has to offer, I will be running the modules through a series of benches to see just how they compare. There will be 8GB and 16GB kits ranging in speed from 1600MHz - 2800MHz, tested at native speeds, as well as overclocked. Overclocking of course will be dependent on exactly how far the testing rig will allow, but I'll push it as far as I can. The testing setup used for these benchmarks is listed below, where Turbo Boost has been disabled to eliminate uncontrolled clock changes that may skew the results. The CPU will be run with default Boost clock speed of 3.9GHz for baseline testing and bumped up to 4.2GHz for OC testing, or as close as possible to that speed. All current updates and patches are installed for Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and the latest driver for the NVIDIA GTX 770 will be used.

CPU-Z: This application visually shows the settings that we have chosen in the BIOS. Items shown in this application include CPU speed and bus settings, motherboard manufacturer, BIOS revisions, memory timings, and SPD chip information.

CPU-Z

Task Manager: We use this utility to show physical memory, kernel memory, page file, and processor usage.

Task Manager

Overclocking:

Overclocking on Intel Haswell processors is quite a bit different from what we are used to in the last few generations, where the CPU clock speeds did not influence the clock speed the memory controller could handle. Entry to Haswell memory overclocking 101 shows that while the CPU may handle a nice overclock of up 4.7GHz to 5.0GHz on really impressive examples, the memory may not scale up past 1866MHz or 2133MHz at those CPU clock speeds, even though the memory modules are rated much higher. What I found on both my CPUs was that anything greater than around 4250MHz on the CPU would not run the memory at 2600MHz or higher. That being said, keeping the CPU as close to 4200MHz was imperative if I wanted to push a set of modules to anything north of 2666MHz.

Initial overclocking on the modules was pretty impressive, as they would run at 2133MHz using the applied 10-11-10-30 timings with only a voltage boost to 1.65v to get the speed stable. Fearing this was about all they would give up since we were dealing with a $79 set of modules, I increased the bclk to 102 and let it rip, and was rewarded with a stable 2176MHz. Already over 300MHz better than the SPD setting of 1866MHz, using the same 10-11-10-30 primary timings. Pretty impressive for a mid-range set of modules. After that display, and seeing that the modules had some room left, I changed the timings to those of the HyperX Predator modules I just looked at to see just how high they would go at 12-14-14-35. I did have to adjust the voltage to the DIMMs to 1.71, but made no other adjustments to the system. If you were not doing the math, that's an 800MHz bump in speed by changing the primary timings and applied voltage.

At 12-14-14-35, you lose a good bit of overall performance in the test metrics by loosening up the timings. As a way to combat some of that, I chose to keep the applied voltage to the modules at 1.71v and divider at 2666MHz to explore how tight I could get the primary timings looking for that elusive performance increase. CAS 11 was not going to happen at even 1.75v, so I changed tRCD and tRP both to 13 and was stable through a few benchmarks. Dropping tRP to 12 easily posted, but was not Memtest stable even up to 1.770v, so I did not go any tighter than 13. Even so, the 800MHz bump is impressive for these memory modules and are a way to play with some upper-end memory overclocking when performance is not a factor.

Maximum Memory Speed:

The maximum memory speed for each set of overclocked modules is indicative of how well the modules ran on this test system. As such, your results may differ in either a positive or negative way based on the capabilities of your hardware. In other words, your mileage may vary!